Lycos at a Glance
Size
Spider Class
Meta Tag support
Frame support
Image Map support
Alt Text support
HTML Comments
Url Searching
Embedded Directory
Submission URL
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38 Million Urls (approx)
Shallow
No
No
No
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Submit
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SUBMISSION POLICY
Lycos is one of those search engines in which the submission policy is not clearly stated. However, they do have some interesting things to say in regard to their spider.
- You may submit more than one URL from your site as long the URLs represent distinct Web pages. Multiple pages that contain the same content are considered "spam" and will be excluded.
- The Lycos spider will try to travel through the links contained in your Web page. You can expect the spider to travel down one level from the page you submit.
- URLs with special characters such as the ampersand (&) and percent sign (%) cannot be added.
HTML FACTS
Compared to others, Lycos is downright primitive in their support. Lycos indexes visible text and image alt text. No support for frames, imagemaps or meta tags is available.
RANKING METHODS
Lycos has this to say about their ranking methods (see ref.)
- Decide two or three terms or phrases on which to focus your efforts -- the "hot" keywords that our 7 million users are most likely to search for. Give those words priority in your HTML. Important words should appear more frequently, in larger headings and closer to the top of the screen if not actually in the page title. An introductory paragraph with descriptive text that mentions your "hot" keywords will help our software create a better abstract of your site.
- Graphical pages are hard to index in the Lycos search, no matter how cool they may look! The ALT attribute of an IMG tag will be analyzed and included in your listing, but we cannot analyze the content of images -- the more text, and the more content, the better.
- If your site contains frames, make sure you use a <NOFRAMES> section. We cannot analyze the content within your frames, but any body text in the <NOFRAMES> section will be indexed. This also addresses a portability issue, since some browsers are not capable of viewing frames.
Lycos continues to use an old method of ranking based on the html <Hn> tags. While once acceptable, this technique is probably pretty useless these days with so many websites online. Its important to note that the lycos system is basically going to use the first 200 or so visible characters from your page as your page summary in their system.
Shown below is an entry of ours found using "north Idaho web design". You'll note this entry ignores entirely our meta tags and jumps straight into the visible text on the page.
2.Northern Webs, North Idaho's premiere internet services company - Specializing in complete web, e-commerce solutions and search engine technology. http://www.northernwebs.com/
http://northernwebs.com/
northernwebs.com
The example below shows how one can end up messing up an entry in Lycos due to alt image tag text. Notice how the beginning of the summary reads?
Idaho Businesses
State of Idaho Banner Image State of Idaho Navigation Image Map Idaho Businesses on the Web This page provides links to Idaho businesses on the Internet. These sources of information are not under the control of the State of Idaho. Please be aware that some of the links may not
http://www2.state.id.us/home/other/business.html
state.id.us
SUMMARY
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines available online. The keys to developing decent ranking within them lies entirely in a combined use of headings and text.
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